The present invention relates generally to cache memory management, and more particularly to managing synonyms in a cache memory system.
Virtual memory systems map virtual (i.e., logical) addresses to physical (i.e., absolute) addresses. In some cases, multiple virtual addresses may map to the same physical address. The multiple virtual addresses are known as synonymous virtual addresses and referred to as synonyms. In order to maintain cache coherency, it is typically necessary to know each synonymous virtual address of a particular physical address and to invalidate those synonyms in response to certain events such as a write operation to any of the synonymous virtual addresses.